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- CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.
- As cults go, members of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
community are a benign crowd. What's not to love? They're cool. They want
to contact ET - using radiotelescopes.
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- They are dreamers with doctorates. They command the vocabularies
of science with eloquence and self-effacing humor. They are the underdogs;
they fight bland congressional tightwads for funding and lose. They bounce
back, resilient. They reside, with the greatest of ease, simultaneously,
in opposing worlds of rationalism and faith. And it is that faith - pursued
without evidence to support the sanctified medium of radio, dogmatic and
selective in its beliefs, closed to alternative possibilities - which makes
their science look so insecure.
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- A full house turned out Tuesday night in Cocoa to catch
the SETI show at Brevard Community College's Fine Arts Auditorium. Leading
the sermon was Dr. Seth Shostak, a brilliant wit at the privately funded
SETI Institute of Mountain View, Calif. Given a) the billions of stars
orbiting billions of galaxies, b) the ongoing discovery of new planets,
and c) amino acids-laden cosmic debris seeding the universe like sperm
cells, painting space as a yawning pond wriggling with life forms was easy
enough. Audience members were told how they, too, could assist the radio
hunt by downloading and crunching signals with the so-called SETI@Home
program.
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- The doors slammed when several listeners advanced the
UFO heresies, wondering if maybe those alien life forms hadn't already
arrived. One woman rattled off a list of related Web sites, prompting Shostak
to charge, "None of those sources you've mentioned are credible."
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- Too bad. Because one of the sites Shostak dismissed -
www.blackvault.com - has nothing to do with alien implants, ancient astronauts,
or any other subjective aspect of the phenomenon. It's jammed solely with
scanned-in photocopies of government documents - 7,000 or so, from acronyms
such as the CIA, DIA, FBI and USAF - acquired through the Freedom of Information
Act. The patterns of high-level interest are clear; what they're onto is
not. We get glimpses of what we already know - military and commercial
pilot reports of wild UFO evasive maneuvers, associated power failures,
radar signatures, etc. - but the best stuff presumably has been blacked
out by censors.
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- Pressed further by another listener who asked why UFO
researchers and SETI guys couldn't reason through this thing, Shostak replied,
"Scientists don't object to a dialogue; it just doesn't go anywhere."
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- Speaking for all scientists, naturally. But not a nine-member
Stanford University panel led by physicist Peter Sturrock who, after examining
the available evidence in 1998, advocated a rigorous public investigation.
Good luck.
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- he data Sturrock's colleagues studied was assembled by
billionaire philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller, who circulated a lengthy
briefing paper on UFOs to top government officials, reportedly including
President Clinton. But the lid remains sealed. In his memoirs, Friends
In High Places, now-disgraced former associate attorney general Webb Hubbell
states one of his greatest regrets was being unable to get to the bottom
of the UFO mystery, which Clinton ordered him to do.
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- Our chief executives often lack the proper security clearances
to know what's going on. Witness Ronald Reagan's Iran-contra debacle. Or
consider the Venona intercepts of the 1940s. That's when Signals Intelligence
monitored the chatter of Soviet espionage rings in the United States and
knew everything about the real - but extremely limited - activities of
domestic agents. Disclosure could've preempted Joe McCarthy's persecutions
of the innocent, since the names of the guilty were known, but protecting
the information was evidently more important than protecting American citizens.
We didn't learn until Senate hearings in 1996 that then-Joint Chiefs of
Staff Chairman Omar Bradley withheld access to the truth from President
Truman.
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- Among the ironies of Shostak's remarks was that the not-credible
Black Vault - constructed by 18-year-old John Greenewald Jr., of Mission
Hills, Calif. - also offers instructions on how to participate in SETI@Home.
Thus, by appropriating "scientists" for the SETI elite and shooing
everyone else into the barnyard of cheap laughs over "little green
men," Shostak and colleagues create artificial schizoid divides that
fail to further the public interest.
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- The Cold War is over, but the pathology of secrecy oozes
forward. Consequently, SETI glows in the dark.
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- _________
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- Billy Cox can be reached at (407) 242-3774, or FLORIDA
TODAY, P.O. Box 419000, Melbourne, FL 32941-9000.
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